


For you, but not for me

by gogollescent



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-15 23:57:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12331428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: Maglor cried “Lost!” and “How could you, brother?” This trickery betrayed itself by goading her to laughter.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling  
>  For you but not for me:  
> For me the angels sing-a-ling-a-ling,  
> They've got the goods for me._

She had her bare arms folded on the sill. She smiled down in proud dismay, as though into a cradle. When he clanked up the stair, his blooded sword, alas, too wet to sheathe, she stepped aside without raising her head. She waved him nearer, all but crying out, Behold!

He beheld a hole blown in a web of foam. The foam lay flat as ash on hot gem-green, waves scrolling over waves without dulling that color. Clearer than the shallows of Valinor—no, blazing though clouded with sand, and in the cloud an eye, which blinked back at him once, in reproach and not amaze. Then a shadow sped across the green.

It was a fish-shadow, and swallowed the star.

Gone green; gone fish. The waves fled to a center, while blue blackened the thick mud of the shore. Maedhros had been deaf but heard the sea-roar, fierce sound failing—he withdrew his head, and the room was dark, misted over with blood-red to stand for the eye’s loss of green. He wiped his sword on his shredded tabard and sheathed it. The brick of the tower was dusty, very cool, when his hand sought it.

“Shouldn’t you throw yourself in?” Elwing offered.

*

Maglor cried “Lost!” and “How could you, brother?” This trickery betrayed itself by goading her to laughter. _How could you?_ She credited him, remarkably, with having let it slip away; and when he said again the jewel was lost when he arrived, she looked at him in stricken grief, seeing he would not own to his great courage.

They buried Amras’s bones in the mud flats. Here the ground was always soft that to the east lay frozen. The sulfur reek siphoned away the flies; flies and midges clustered on the sand-quilled humpbacked seaweed, no ghouls they. Geese bayed overhead, bobbled in long lines, and being paired on the huntsman’s lead had to go leaping after summer. At the same time as his sister dug, Maedhros still laid the body on the pyre—with a feeling of unwise haste, because time rushed forward and backward unseen, dangled the reeds at a slant, and Amras, certainly dead, was all intact but for his belly. And was ashes. Face white but smudged with softening grime, mouth prone to click open again—his limp arm pointed past the side of the pyre to a welter of footsteps. _Look, two elves went there; armored, to leave such impressions._ His soul lay down in darkness, lost. Because of the oath taken hours before, five hundred years of sun and moon and roaming hill-shadows before, Amras had gone out like a hooded candle, and left behind his well-knit but unraveled, heavy body. Maedhros didn’t believe otherwise; but he felt driven to say to the corpse, What of your wishes? How was the fighting at the gates? Are you weary, and if you are, how do I make you comfortable? Alone in thought, he played the part he had played out a thousand times, angry and yet glad to have one loyal head to accuse: knowing Amras knew it. Knowing, therefore, that hatred could never outlast kindliness between brothers. He cajoled with the corpse, but in silence; he was not forgetful, he plotted to forget, he postured in case madness might yet catch him unawares. There were none now to hang him high. What he wished to say was what Amras had said before every attempt— _What else is there?_ Yes, Amras, what else will we find: you, your sister and I?

Off with the armor, prized and fitted to one frame. Off with bow and horn.  Amras dressed again in a plain shift—tunic laced at the neck—and burned barefoot, like a youth in Manwë’s choir. He hadn’t noticed Caranthir’s dwarf-bells in Amras’s braids before he died. They had to be rescued; only then, too, did he himself unweave all Amras’s red hair, while Maglor held the torch low, pouring its woven shadow over sand. He tore out strands of hair with the last bell.

One glance at the Silmaril had ripped a film from his eyes, scraped dirt that he’d taken for flesh from his nostrils, pounded his back until a pound of silt jumped up his throat, clogging and then sliding off his tongue. It gave him a pain in his stump like his hand, elsewhere, hungered for the jewel. Now, having cheated himself, his pulse still delved in the flesh of his cheek; his eye fluttered because his heart sat sprawling on his eye. More than awake, he could breathe better if he ran, harried by the long dream that awoke him: that dream flamed like flame’s shadow under sand, sifting loose grains. It came to him that the oath had no knowledge of what was true. It heard and saw without learning what more would be of use to it: learning only that the jewel still lived, it was often spoken of. If the jewel was far, why, he must follow—as though it were not possible that he should cease to move.

*

A dream that Maglor spitted a young seabird, and he woke and went and found her over Elwing: still alive. Maglor was too tall for the tent. She had kicked up the furs that covered the dew-cold ground. Her other hand she held to her chest as though the hand were broken. “Listen,” he heard her say, shortly, as if tested. Elwing had a two-handed grip on Maglor’s wrist, and together they moved the knife in a laddered square, the point a foot from Elwing’s chest, which, however, was guarded by nothing tougher than a night-shirt. Maglor, silent, had been humming; the air was wet with motion, like churned ice.

He separated them by the expedient of taking Maglor’s shoulder and turning her to face him. She got her wrist free, handed him the knife, and fled. Elwing he had thought would say no word, show less fear, but she crouched at his feet and said, “Please, if you have any pity, go.”

Maglor awaited him under a broken-backed cypress. Her hands were whole but plucked her cloak. The mist stood between them. Like unfinished forge-work, her eyes poured out sparks; he remembered where he had first seen it, rising to his knees a hundred miles south of Formenos. First he’d retched up the proceeds of the hunt; then he noticed his sister, glaring north.

Her hair blew in chunks, a half-mane. She cut it short for Amras as she had done twice before, and it grew long.

“If you want to be rid of her—” For a moment he couldn’t go on; he was too angry. His voice was hoarse from want of use and sure enough to shock him, he stopped because it had come out too simply, the right words. He left his mind open like a pit for his followers to read, and to borrow strength, if they chose, from his mood, a cheat learned from his father in the weeks before his death. But when he spoke, he didn’t sound like a man dying: only sick. And he had deadened comfort from her nearness, which, far from thwarting his temper, made it simpler to rage. “Why be rid of her? Doesn’t she deserve protection? Should we have cut her down when she surrendered, and told Círdan she fell out of her tower?”

“Have we told Círdan anything?”

“No indeed. We’re accursed.” Actually he had begun and scraped blank several drafts, but it was of little matter, with Círdan besieged on the isle, themselves on the shore.

“Let us send her to him, then. Be rid of her at once.”

No. He saw Maglor smile, with the old unwitting arrogance: pride that flowed as blood from any wound.

“I heard her mind cry out. She wanted to die—in her dream. In my madness, I was afraid… I went to protect her. I thought of killing her, I admit. I’m afraid, if she lives, she’ll avenge herself on us,” she said frankly. “You, anyway, while asleep in your bed. Lately you have been sleeping better. Yet she deserves all the help we can give.”

He was growing calmer.

“But I find I don’t want to be slain,” Maglor added. “I hope you didn’t give her back her knife. It seems hard to me, if, failing in our quest, we must still die. Does it seem so to you?”

“Did you also have a dream that she had swallowed the stone?”

She had been their prisoner, on that night, for some days. She grew weary of pride, or better understood that she need use no secret strength in making fools of them, who were also plagued by midges. She was permitted to tend her children but not to sleep by them: Maglor’s innovation. Elrond and Elros had doubtless slept without their mother for one or two years, being half human—more or less, he tried once to work it out—human, anyhow, to a camp of elves. They were rude and enunciated winsomely. Maglor otherwise treated Elwing well enough, apologized long and kept away from her, but couldn’t keep away from the children, whom, indeed, Elwing seemed loath to warn against her. Why? Perhaps she thought she would die soon and they would need some guardian. It was true _he_ would do nothing till all others left him, cursing him—although when he met the twins in the camp his heart leapt, as it did when he came across other reminders of the Silmaril encased in mail at the bottom of the sea. Other reminders, such as the sea.

He thwarted her next escape by tarrying too long on the shore, after the hot stones of the cookfires grew safe to touch, and their people, having fished and feasted, retreated to the high ground to rest. She sat hooded in one of their skiffs, stirring the net in the mud-choked water, cut to strips by the screening reeds. But she had put out the lantern, and so, observing her, he knew who she was.

He felt for Maglor, half a league off. _Find the twins_. Elwing pushed off, hearing him also, and he waded after her.

That frightened Maglor. “Where were you going?” she asked, many times. Fearing for Elwing, she forgot she feared Elwing; at any rate she became more willing to ignore Elwing’s rebuffs, to follow her and order her to trust in them. When Elwing would not answer, she replied on her behalf: “I slew your people and your father’s people. But Morgoth slew Beleriand, and between Morgoth’s kingdom and ours there is now no last haven, no walled country…”

“Your land is Morgoth’s land,” said Elwing, steady.

“Not so,” Maglor said. “Lady, it isn’t. If it were so, we would have the use of a forge.”

Elwing trusted Maglor more than Maedhros. Maglor glowered and made answer, and generally behaved like the wolf-whelp Elwing’s dreams must have supplied—the poor mad dog, fawning and then fierce, and at times wholly taken up with its own hound-business. Maedhros wondered if he should warn Elwing Maglor was wise.

He would have been hard-pressed to praise his sister’s wisdom. It lay in speaking truth in merriment, in flattering him while she questioned him, and in regretting, bitterly, what was done when it was done—not an art he ever learned. How could he say, Maglor is wise because she never closed her eyes at all; even in dread, face pressed to the earth, or with hands held to guard against a blow never delivered, and even blind, she peered out at the dark?

*

They couldn’t stir ten leagues from the lifeless shore. Forts spied far off—forts the Noldor built—smoked with hell’s industry, and orc-nests, once cleansed, were little easier to defend than the open pits. He thought of daring Nargothrond itself on the strength of Sirion’s granaries, but they weren’t well-mounted, they would die on the plains, and had they taken it they wouldn’t keep it. But it was in his mind that other pockets of survivors might litter the coast. After the battle he had divided his forces, sent half and more back to Taur-im-Duinath to recuperate or scatter; the core he kept were loyal, but their loyalty would admit of no refusal. What aid they might lend to a rescue he couldn’t judge. He would make the attempt, if occasion arose. They met no one on the march.

As for Elwing, she revived a little, in the aftermath of her small rebellion. She hadn’t turned when he followed her skiff through the reeds, but now she studied his followers boldly, as one hidden in a thorn-brake. Over the tops of her sons’ heads, having begged the privilege of mending her captors’ shirts, she radiantly ignored her finger-work and gazed around. It was necessary to be warier, as failure had emboldened her; when establishing a new camp, and because he was less useful than many, digging latrines, he was demoted to her guard.

“Why always set a watch on the shore?” said Elwing. “Can it be you’re afraid Círdan will come and pardon you?”

Not all the bitterness in her voice was for him. He had never uttered a word where she could hear, and she had no cause to expect an answer. He said without thinking, “I hope your husband will come and ransom you.”

The fog had taken on temporary direction and fell in a fine drizzle. She looked more Beorian hooded: she had the shape of her grandfather’s eyes, the flat set of his jaw, his little ears, and his high shoulders, thrust into view when her hair was covered.

She had also, to be sure, the even-toned skin and gray eyes of her grandmother, the gracious strength of the Sindar, and double-jointed wrists, which might have come from anywhere. To hear her crack her knuckles after dark was a spell against sleep. For all that, she held herself stiffly, after the morning’s ride. Because from the first she had moved like a maid of his own people, it took him time to feel that—at rest—she was a stranger. He first met humans in Finrod’s train: Finrod who had a knack for bringing home strays under ideal circumstances, through no fault of his own, and who looked, on a borrowed horse, weary, inattentive, and ready to oblige. A poor rider once tired out with roaming, he had a way of being jostled understandingly. Just so he must have ridden out from Nargothrond—but no, for his band had gone on foot, and at all odds he had been angry, which had its focusing effect on Finrod’s looks, if not his mind. Maedhros remembered. But weary, diligent and weary: so he must have been when he set tooth to the wolf.

It wasn’t an auspicious cove in which for the captain to lay anchor. They fled north and west around the cape after the assault, and crossed brown wastes and pale sand until the strand grew rocky, high cliffs reared over hills, as if the land that laid down for thirst had drunk its fill at last of the churning sea. From the mist, then, he and his charge should have taken refuge in a notch at the base of the cliff, where shingle crunched underfoot, as the ground in an aisle of maples; but she stayed just outside the mouth, unwilling to go in. With slender hands half-curled at her sides, she stood slack-featured, all demure, but her soft voice lost its velvet on her—wearing—surety: “He can’t. Return here, and be a prisoner? His duty lies west.”

“As our duty is the keep of his wife?” He made an effort. “Where are your sons?”

“They were glad to banish me. I find there were no women among Túrin’s outlaw band.” Her smile dashed to his efforts to place the name. “Where are Eluréd and Elurín?”

Because he was so unprepared, he felt almost nothing. Indignation shrank and shot up like a shadow cast by a brand. He said, “Were you never told?”

“I have been told—by madwomen who pitied me. That was kind, but now I am among you. You’re elves. Your own people despised you for the sack of my city, they turned and fought beside my guards. So where are they?” She said it gaily, without any conviction, her smile thoughtful, and a hitch in her breathing. She was playing games with herself. “You would have sold them to me, had you kept them. How long ago did they escape?”

Again he heard his own silence—at least, he heard the shrieking of the gulls.

Elwing began to hum, like that would stir his memory. She hummed, slow and out-of-step, a bar of the tune Maglor had worked that night inside the tent, which the air hoarded. Then when she ended his knees gave out.

His hand, splayed under him on the cragged wall of the cave, was like some warning nailed there; below the wrist he didn’t feel it, the pain in it was stones grasped through a sack, while if it had been his he would have felt nothing at all. And his cloak, now: his cloak that she had mended was grown heavy and it clung. It was too warm. He met her eyes with an effort. The helmet’s visor fell if he raised his head too far.

He said, “They were left in the forest to starve. You should have heard it from me earlier, but I thought the tale reached you, long ago,” as word of your survival came to me. “I’m sorry. You are right in that it was none of my will or Maglor’s; Lossel and Égon could have told you that, and they had not died in defense of your tower.” Although he knew why his fighters turned, and even perceived that it wasn’t beyond hope that Elwing should have prevailed, if enough stood aside, still he didn’t forgive their deaths, who died and achieved nothing. He was glad at least that Amras hadn’t wavered at the end; hadn’t, like Amrod and Dior’s sons, slept his way away from life, lain down and dreamed atop the steps of Elwing’s court.

“But you must have killed them.” She stared at his feet. There at the very back of the cave were puddles left from high tide, which squelched under heel. He took off his helmet, in case he would need something blunt for a club. “Who else could have done it? And _you_ didn’t, for you are not mad.” She came close and put a hand on his pauldron, little finger trembling while the rest all but held; going to her toes and back down in an instant she said, “Listen, it will be kept secret, for I’ve no way to go and none to tell. So I ask you once more: where are my brothers?”

“Dead,” he said, “like my brothers; frozen to death. Or starved.” Her hand relaxed, her grip settled in something loose and sure. In another moment she would think to let go. All he could do was wait; the time to strike was past. He hung the helmet on his hook. “I searched for them, but I was a stranger to those woods. My brother Celegorm ordered their deaths. Or his servants did it in remembrance of him, I couldn’t make it out. They died without telling any living where they left your father’s heirs or why they did that cruel deed. Celegorm died even earlier: you may recall what he did to your grandmother, mad or sane. We were destroyed that night in truth, if it’s a comfort to you. But by dawn the snow lay deeper than the waists of trees; I myself almost lost this other hand.” He held up the back of his hand to her, though the scars from frostbite were long healed. “Don’t tell your sons they have uncles living, in fallen Doriath.”

She cast back her hood and stepped back; she was taking down her hair, winding it through her fist as rope she would not purchase. Then she pulled.

“Stop. Think where you are,” he said, dropping his light style—cold, as he would have been to a friend in need of numbing.

“In the woods,” she said.

“I wish indeed I had saved your brothers. Would Maglor give you no answer?”

“She told me to ask you.”

She did see his eyes then, and would have bolted from whatever she found there. He caught her cloak, which slithered out of his hand with its own will; then he lunged and caught her arm above the elbow. She looked at him significantly: I must run. He shook his head, almost maddened with pity—nagged by it as by the stinging of gnats—and with half his mind thought in plain irritation, when will Gernion come and say we have our perimeter?

Her mouth opened, and out snaked her true voice. Not the clipped modern speech—not the alighting hum. A wordless note that seized him fore and aft, swept falling up his breastbone and his back. She faltered and, desperate, he tossed the helmet away and clapped his hand to her mouth, used the cuff of the hook to pinion her head, and walked her back toward the mouth of the cave. She fought like a calf in yoke, ducking to cast off the load, and succeeding in bearing it with her. That Elwing, who wanted to die, should fear him still, struck him as dreadful; he got her in a headlock. Once trapped she rediscovered dignity. Shoulders squared, breath puffing on his finger, she didn’t move until he let her go, whereon she scuttled backward. She raised her arm, but she was shielding her head.

He stood now himself under the stone arch, fresh air draped through his sparse hair but not his fingers held behind his back; and he glimpsed pelicans and gulls wheeling like refuse picked up by the wind. There were so many. Later, he learned that a whale had died near the shore.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I was frightened, I’m sorry, I know, you mean me no harm any longer, I have nothing of yours.”

*

“Teach her less music.”

“I’m not. I’m teaching the twins.”

The twins, to do them justice, showed no bent toward songs of power. It was possible that would change if he destroyed whatever home they made next. For the present, Elrond liked the long lays of Valinor, and Elros liked Maglor’s improvisations, and could be heard plunking away mathematically when he had his turn. But in most ways they were close-allied, and when Elrond told his own version of the history of the Noldor it was with Elros’s fanatical encouragement, the two at times competing to add rare embellishments.

Elrond with Elros to hear him became unnervingly pompous, and a better mimic; he had Maglor’s lecturing patter exactly, and he fast learned the deep sigh-sob of a declaiming poet—a halt to finish every line, and never mind the meaning. “Fëanor and the Falmari. The whalers held his head under the waves. And he would have been straightaway quenched. But here comes his half-brother, _full brother in heart_ —!”

What they understood of Maedhros and Maglor’s relation to the tale was unclear. Maedhros had the idea that Maglor had told them she and her brother were named for princes of the Noldor, long since perished. Maglor seemed happy to exaggerate as much as Elwing, sitting near, would allow, and indeed Elwing never opposed her to her face, although from time to time she would reach out, smiling, to receive a childish offering—a pinecone or egg of white quartz; a beech leaf, cast in bronze—at which Maglor often did desist.

“You teach the twins, but their mother learns faster,” said Maedhros.

No response. They’d supped on whale and a hard round of Sirion’s bread; his tongue felt thick with oil, so perhaps she misheard him. She had in mind an arrangement of the Lay of Leithian suitable for a learner. By decree, she didn’t play on starless nights, when the potbellied half-moon drove against the wind, keel glimpsed through the cloud-wrack—somewhere orcs were cursing the same wind, darting from lee to lee under cloud’s rotted shadow—but she lay belly-up with her traveling harp and pressed the strings, and, pressing, lightened her touch to nothing again too lightly to loose sound; and her lips barely moved, but they never stilled. The firepit, dug arm-deep, wasn’t deep enough to take the fire’s head out of the wind. It bent in a supple mass, smoke like a dimmer brown stage of the flame, brush emptied of paint at the halfpoint of the stroke.

In the same way Elwing’s tirades petered off, retaining their form but not their heat—not above half their heat. She grew more familiar toward Maglor day by day. Maglor no longer went out on forays, citing the need to preserve her power to heal; besides sharing in the education of the twins, she and Elwing also worked to tend those hurts scouts earned in skirmishes. That work Elwing set to with a good enough will: forbidden to work any further curses into cloth, they would soon learn what spells she could effect by sewing flesh. She sat with the wounded and suffered their praises (“Be brave, lady, you’re a vision of peace”) and their blame. Sometimes, guided more by scent than any wood-lore, she and Maglor gathered wild plants and roots. The day before they had gone off to raid a rank green clearing in the little wood that capped the cliffs; soon after he felt Maglor’s dismayed embarrassment, like she’d pricked herself on a thorn.

He saw what she saw, in clearer detail than usual. Elwing gestured imperially with the basket.

“You could change his will.”

Maglor started to cough. “I couldn’t, in fact.”

“Don’t I have the measure of you? Isn’t it your music that binds these many to him?”

“Like a spell?” asked Maglor, with childish directness. “Like what I did to you? After, I must tell you, I slept for a very long time. I’m not a spirit of the outer lands. My music never found an ear but where someone stayed listening—and why not? when after all, they were promised an answer. I can answer. But, lady, there are some who won’t ask. Our followers, after many years—”

Even a mile up the beach, the reek from the beached whale was strong. His head ached. And the new arrangement of the Lay, so far as he could judge from sight alone, involved an excess of tinkling.

“Maglor, I should ask. Are you planning a coup?”

She folded up at the waist with the groan, arm tight across the harp. “She’s wholly misjudged us. I mean, she’s mistaken our position.”

“Ah?”

A shove to the back, hard enough to make up for weak aim. He moved with it civilly. “You ought not to encourage her,” she said, “with your pacing, and mute snuffling, and your hand always on the pommel of your sword…”

“But it fits well there,” he said, “it is comfortable there. As for my nose, I can’t help if it runs in this bad climate. I don’t think she ever feared me,” meaning: sometimes she isn’t afraid. “What is it she wanted you to bewitch me to do?”

Maglor sighed. “Send her sons away,” she said. “I told her—impossible. By now Círdan will have collected the other survivors. He won’t return to Sirion, where ghosts have their haven.”

“She’s no fool. So why is it she thinks she can sway you?”

“Don’t profess to doubt me,” said Maglor. She began to unstring the harp. “Don’t say to yourself, Maglor is fickle, Maglor may forsake me yet. I may not, and I will not. Don’t pretend to believe it, when you think I will die before I abandon you.” By mistake she struck a note and it soared on, not at all like music. They listened together for the answering howl.

The next day Elros interrupted Maedhros in the middle of a consultation with the worst-hurt of the scouts. The scout said, “Oh, it’s his highness,” without much interest; she would die before the day was out.

“His _majesty_ ,” Elros corrected, flat. “Hello. She’s sick.”

His mother or Maglor? They should have been together. Maedhros pressed the scout’s hand and went with the boy.

When they were close enough that he could see Elwing’s back through a stand of nettles (it was not hard to guess that Elros had watched from here a while before going on his way), he opened his mind. Elros was always feeling for the thoughts of others, and responded instantly. Maedhros pictured the face of the physician who tended to the scout, and then Elros, and then the path back to the stream. In return he got a hunching-in of thin shoulders, distaste at this crude pantomime; he’d forgotten the boy was a twin.

Elwing had vomited in the creek. At least she had troubled to go downstream of the spring; and, faring so far, she lay now on her belly, drinking from cupped palms. One slippered foot kicked like a child’s. She got up on her hands at the sound of Elros running.

Maedhros stepped carefully through the nettles and offered her his hand, which she took. She rose to her knees and tugged her arm away, then went down on all fours, with more care. Stooping again, she addressed the creek.

“My husband is in Valinor. And I, _and_ _I_ —”

She blinked and spat. He doubted her at once, wished to unhear her, as he had doubted Lossel, in pieces on the threshold of the tower. How could she betray herself, and gain so little? As if in agreement, she rubbed, pawed, at her spit-slick mouth.

“What have you drunk?”

“What have I drunk,” she said with deep humor, “but a cup of wine, and bitterness and gall out of the bucket. Will you bring more? Hold. Didn’t you hear me? _My husband_ —”

“I heard. And Maglor?”

“She,” counting on bent-back fingers, “is either south of here, taking bark off the willows; or west of here, flensing the whale; or east of here, pulling mallow-root; or else in hell, seeking a Silmaril.” Her back stiffened, and he was gifted with a view of her expression: she had thrown her head back, painfully. “You may report what I said about Eärendil; I meant it. Don’t tell her I was ill. Promise not to say that I wept!” Only as she spoke did tears come, and she dashed them away, dropping her head, then gasped and pushed her knuckles in her eye, and mouthed a wail.

What now, Maedhros thought, they’re lying for each other. He scratched around the cuff on his stump; today he had worn the brass-capped hand, to visit the dying, but in Elwing’s presence he was tempted to doff it. “If I don’t,” he said over her panting, “what will you do for me?”

Elros brought the physician. That was a gentle, silver-haired elf, who like Maglor shunned battle, and sometimes begged off cleaning fish. He arranged Elwing with her back to an oak, propped up on the oak, and took her pulse for almost a minute. Elwing struggled for a moment and, at Maedhros’s bland attention, subsided. Elros stood by with a composed skeptical frown; “I might do it differently, given the chance,” remarked his arms across his back, and his foot hooked behind one ankle. When the physician beckoned he went running to her, and Elwing gathered him roughly under one arm. Her other arm lay straight at her side, like that of a knight, resting in armor.

The physician had moved to peeling back her brow and shining the light of his eye into her red-rimmed eye. “I erred,” she said, looking thus cyclopsed at Maedhros. She said it fairly loudly. “I beg forgiveness for hiding of your heirloom. To make amends, I’ll go and be an exile. Will you not free me? Let me go to the Isle, let me shelter with those who love me better.”

“If you wished to be free, you should have given me the jewel.”

“It wasn’t mine.” Elwing stroked Elros’s hair, that hung long about his shoulders. “My father’s mother saved it. It lay entombed in hell until she came. And Beren fought the wolf, and died, and Lúthien died with him, and saved him like the jewel! And it hallowed their island; you who were born in the light of the Trees, you, Maedhros, who saw his crown—I tell you, from the time I was born I remember that, a place where all things grew. Lúthien then was an old woman and an elven-maid together, flourishing like the holly beside oak. And it healed Beren’s hurts before he died. And Thingol the king was slain for the treasure, and Dior my father, and I find my brothers; and I took it to the sea. It was not for spite of you. Why should I not hate you, but it wasn’t in fear of you, but of myself, in case I forgot…. It wasn’t mine. Do you understand, I was warned? _The sea required it_.”

“As I recall, it was eaten by a fish.”

The physician rose. “Not poisoned, but much the worse for wine,” he murmured, and didn’t wait for Maedhros’s permission to depart. Maedhros didn’t follow. It was the occasional feeling of being guided that was worst, after all his errors. He felt the same interest in the her that he would have felt in a casket that once held the Silmaril; in a vine dried and cut and sent forth from the Land of the Dead that Live, where all things grew. “You wrote to me once—”

“I, write to you?”

“Perhaps a scribe wrote and you dictated?” I’m sorry if we killed him, he almost said; I could use a scribe. “You wrote that you would treat with me, but not before your lord returned.” I took that for diplomacy, but maybe you were earnest. “Yet you were queen in your own right, and the jewel, if not yours, was held yours to dispose of. Did it guide him from afar? And will it guide him now from the bottom of the sea?”

“She doesn’t know,” said Elros without opening his eyes.

Maedhros pointed to Elros. “Had his father returned, would you have kept your word?”

“It saved the Havens,” she said, after a time. “Every season when it seemed that a harvest would fail; whenever we feared that a ship wouldn’t return. I went with it to the fields where my people worked, man and woman and child, to warm the ground, and I walked up and down the rows, wearing it. We prayed together. But—yes, maybe. I would have brought myself to it. In time, I would have heard out your demands.”

“In time. Yes. Will you treat with me?” Maedhros asked. “If he returns?”

Elros rolled over under her hand and flung out his arms like a corpse. He had sharper ears than either of them, and heard Maglor approaching.

Maglor, flushed to the brows, hair unbound, led Elrond before her at a distance—doubtless bribed. He toppled onto Elros and lay there peaceably. Maglor turned—to stride off?—but stopped when she observed Maedhros, standing in the black oak’s shadow. Her mouth opened; she made a curt, open-handed gesture, half of disavowal, and half a salute. She rubbed the back of her hand, where Elwing must have kissed it. Then she touched her hand to her mouth.

He returned the salute. Apparently abashed at so much courtesy, Maglor bowed to Elwing. Elwing extricated her arm from the twins and rolled to a seat.

“You ran away,” she told Maglor, making no move toward her, but regarding her with easy discipline: she would make trial of whether she could outstare the serpent. Maglor wasn’t looking back, but it seemed Elwing believed her skin was covered with eyes. “I’m sorry if I wronged you. Look you, I sicken with neglect.” She didn’t smile until Maglor came and kissed the top of her head.

That night he dreamed of Fingon sitting in the hollow of a stricken oak, in Elwing’s place—anyway, in a white gown, in a crown of lilies wrought in silver, and with his bottom cushioned by much moss. But it was Fingon, as could be learned from the relentless tapping boot and the wires in his hair. He pretended not to mark Maedhros, then looked straight at him: not his eye but his face cut air, in keen-edged hope that imitated hate.

“Come down,” said Maedhros. He laid his hand upon the bole and leaned against his hand, holding one heel off the mulch, like a lover in a play.

“What, and be killed?”

“You don’t fear me,” said Maedhros—mumbling, he realized, through a mouthful of loose teeth, as he had done when giving up his crown. “Come here.”

Fingon descended, with a great to-do of skirts. He had never been so graceful in Sindar regalia as he supposed, for all his goodwill. He remained bowed for a moment and straightened, or, as Maedhros thought of it, he held his face up for inspection: the flat temple and the sweep of bone for his cheek, a portrait carved intaglio in the faceless forest. The snow had melted and the searcher’s footprints with it. The bank was corseted with roots. The trees had new green coats. From every bough hung tails of lichen, drying, not frilled with ice; fawns hoisted their hindquarters carelessly as they went bounding over stumps. It was Thingol’s realm and a pleasaunce, and beams of sun made cobweb-awnings, spread between the posts of leaning pines… he was grateful to drift in the becalmed cool, in which light was an ornament and not the very air. Light crossed itself, canceled other light, turned smaller leaves to a dusting of jewels and back again to shining metal. In the midst of bracken and beside mushroom-stairs, skirt raised on the backs of ferns, Fingon stood without much patience, enduring mistrust. Without his neck shifting, his head seemed to tilt if Maedhros approached, to show him all of one side: Maedhros wondered, in sudden doubt, if he had but half a head. But Fingon sprang with both feet and spun in midair, landed facing the other way, and now displayed the hidden side, quite as pan-flat.

Maedhros struck out. Fingon had his wrist before the blow could touch him. Well, and they had sparred since they were boys.

Fingon dropped his hand, as Maglor had dropped the knife. “You aren’t your own.”

“I know it well,” said Maedhros, bemused. “I am my father’s, and my brothers’—Maglor’s and the oath’s.”

“And mine,” said Fingon. “All the world’s. _The oath’s_ , ha. Think you that you’re that free?”

*

Waking, he didn’t know he had dreamed. It came back to him in mid-afternoon, whereon he wasted a few minutes gloating over its intact sense, like a cache of nuts left over from the winter.

He was with Maglor then, considering the problem of Eglarest. He had thought before they might find Barad Nimlas still standing. They had thought, indeed, that they might take back the havens there; from the late scout’s testimony it was clear they would not. He himself could make out the ruins, crawling with orcs and sheltering vampires, if he looked a long ways. Maglor sat cross-legged on the cliff, eyes shut, mouth sewn in a flap. Her deep tan got life from the the low-hanging light; on that day, it was so hot and dusty, the sea rose in a pale ridge, halfway up the violet sky, glistening with patches of false snow.

He hated the land and the sea laying siege to it. The fierceness of hate sent him on an idle accounting, saying to himself how much he’d loved the land, even the sea; never a glad love, often lighthearted, but once he was consoled by the breadth of Beleriand, and now every distance was a trouble and a burden to him. He had been healed, then not healed, then healed again, in time to know that the land suffered and to be galled by its suffering—as he had despised his brothers’ shame once he was well, while in his sickbed it was entertainment. Very well, and so? He missed roads: real roads, crowned with blocks of lava. The heat stung him, the brightness lay on stillness like a tarnish, spotty and changeful though not a breeze stirred the air, and yesterday or the day before trees lazed in a strong wind.

At the end of long disputation, conducted in grunts and dueling images, he sat back to back with her. “You’ll push me off,” she protested.

“Are you so near the edge? What do you hear?”

“It’s a question of smelling, believe it or not. The North Wind says…”

“Nothing. There’s no wind.” They couldn’t even smell the bare stink of the whale.

“It’s a figure of speech—” at his cough, “when I use it; others have Manwë’s favor and may speak with the wind, but they aren’t here. Attend. We knew it a night and a night ago. They’ve allied with Taur-en-Faroth’s wargs. There’s no way inland.”

Her back was warm, unbearable from the sun, and sweat started out on his neck and palms, sitting thus close. His view was of the little wood, haunted by archers. “What about the West Wind?”

“Gulls. What will you do if Eärendil never comes? Is that what you borrow against—Eärendil fetching up the jewel out of the sea?”

“I don’t know what I borrow on. She said she was impelled to throw it in. Do you think she’s right? Could he have reached Aman?”

“With the Silmaril? Why not?”

“—it doesn’t _float_ , it’s not hollow, and how should it have flown to him—”

“If Ulmo has it, he may do what he wills with it.”

Yes, Ulmo. Maedhros hadn’t forgotten the Valar, they were to him as the dead. But piety had grown in Maglor late: she would have said it lay asleep in her lost youth, but he knew better. As for him, he had lost the knack of doubt. The Silmaril was as lost if it lay at the bottom of the sea as if it shone in Mindon Eldaliéva. He feared the Valar, but not only the Valar. The stone had been lost when he climbed the stair, with Elwing at the top of the tower, determined not to give it to him; she would not give it him, and he believed her. It would be lost as long as anything strove to withhold it. He had sought twice to steal it from his fate. But he was a bad thief, he had learned that very young. So I must persuade, he said to himself, I must do as I did in Tirion, and turn every opponent to my course; but then, he had become a bad orator.

“If he reaches Aman,” he said, “what then? Now—say I’m Eönwë, and you be Eärendil. I come to you on the dunes and say, let’s see—‘Be afraid! Mortal man, you are wayward. In these Undying Lands you may yet die—’”

“You have none of his manner,” said Maglor, untangling her legs. “I’ll take Eönwë’s part. You be Manwë.”

“Are we not cursed enough—”

“Say you that the Elder King is cursed?” She sprang up in battle stance. He swiveled to face her, just as she, too, swung about, dark pits bored in the blue enamel of her eye-whites, and teeth bared in a snarl. It was true; she was a better Eönwë.

“No,” he replied, searching for Manwë’s voice, and recalling in time that blasphemy was not the purpose. “He is sad. What news?”

She paced toward him, then abruptly knelt. “Eärendil is here: son of Idril, daughter of Turgon, son of Fingolfin. Also he says he is the child of Tuor, son of Rían, daughter of—perhaps, as there are a great many names—”

“We Ainur are like beasts from the wild let into Time’s house, such that every room, small or great, is small to us; also we speak a tongue renowned for pithy naming; but by all means, go on.”

Her hands crossed on her knee with an odd, restful limpness, compared to the bow of her spine. “Yes. Thank you. I had forgotten that. However, in sum, he came to plead the part of Middle-earth. In search of us, he sailed night and day, he threaded the maze of the enchanted isles, and he kindled the shadowy sea.”

“How?”

“He bears a Silmaril of Fëanor.”

“Sit,” he said, pointing to a flat rock beside him. ‘Eönwë’ gave him a fierce look, shuffled sideways on the bent knee, and got up as stiffly as she could and perched. “ _Idril_ ’s son? What is his plea?”

“Pardon for the Noldor, and pity for their sorrows; mercy for men and elves and succor in their need.” It was the prayer that ended the Noldolantë.

Not letting the silence grow, he said, “Does he know what the Noldor have done to his wife?”

The hands uncrossed and formed a cup. “He received the Silmaril, which, falling to him, must have beggared his wife.” She thought harder. “He knows their deeds at Sirion.”

In the heat of the day—hot through—Maedhros felt close by some radiant cold: his back was to a tower of ice, but the cold never reached him; he recoiled inside himself though it failed to arrive.

“And he asks pardon? Who is he to speak for the Noldor, while they hold slave his wife and his sons? Is this the prayer we have longed for, the messenger looked for—a man whose heart lies bound on the far shore?”

Maglor leaned forward. “Then shall he be denied?”

“Yes, he must be.” Her head turned, like she heard an echo. “The fleet sails, but not in mercy. We are no one’s ransomers.”

Maglor slid from the stone and took his hand, but didn’t kiss it. She was then done with the part. She held his hand to her cheek. He said, “Did I forget my cues? Do we play out the scene again?”

“If you believe it,” said Maglor, “then... What if they come?”

“In judgment, or in mercy?”

“Maedhros,” dropping his hand—and he remembered the dream. She went on, heedless of his grin. “Are they our judges? Are they what we feared—and if they are, I am not now afraid. For why should they judge us unmercifully? For what other purpose were they put in the world—led, beasts, into this hall?”

At his face she cried out in dismay, and wouldn’t let him answer. “Very well. What shall we do if they come now to _eat_ us: unclean carrion?”

“Abide and wait for Eärendil,” said Maedhros simply. “If he goes with them. Or if he comes alone. Though they refuse him, they won’t wrest the jewel from him; they never take.”

“Except of carcasses. You’ve thought of everything. Except, what if Eärendil drowned? Suppose the Silmaril burned through that fish’s guts and sank into the mire. And therefore I say, you aren’t Manwë. For Manwë need never have waited for Eärendil, if all that he purposed was to cheat him and deny him.”

“All right.”

“What?”

“I confess it. I’m not Manwë.” He touched her wrist, and she flung it up out of reach. He put his arm more craftily around her back, and she leaned under it, and looked about with such remorse that he took his hand back.

“My heart is sick,” she said, still bent, as if the roof hung low. She gave a further gulp and struggled up, her face all clouded: she was dark as Caranthir, stern as Curufin, rash as Celegorm, feckless as the twins, but unlike all his brothers she yet lived, and could be tempted. He was sorry for her, because she was weary; but relieved, relieved beyond any repenting that she of all remained to him. And it relieved him to be generous, like being glad of her, he could reach down into death—into her death, whenever she should die.

Then he knew what he felt. The fear that fled light-footed over him was the same that jumped when he bid her spare Elwing: espied at last, a season on, though it walked him through spring without a scent. It ran across his thoughts. It crowned him, ticklish behind the ears. He lay denned like a bear after winter, heart bursting from the weakness of hunger: come fear, come, fear, come down and feed me.

For want of peace, he said, “Sick with love of our prisoner?”

She stared at him. “Why not?” This followed by a nod. “My wife is dead. Elwing is very fair: the likeness of Lúthien, whom our brother loved. Maybe she’ll yield in a thousand years. I have in mind to write a song for her,” she said, slow, without any break between her savagery and fact: “something like Lúthien before Morgoth, which, if I’m besotted as you say, she’ll have to sing for me. But I’d like to learn the limits of her power. You were wrong—forgive me—you know you were wrong to think, learning of Lúthien, that you could triumph over him at war.” She covered his scabbard with one hand, whiter than her face. “We are very little. He may regret us now.”

It was hard to hear her. Except she had always spoken so, in the lightness of hope—but she had spoken then of gifts that could be hoped for: the Sun to return, the rains to last. Also she had spoken so of madness to the mad: to their brothers, kindly—Let us prevail! To their father, Your heart will cool.

“If you’d lead her before us as a hound,” he began. “Or a sow, to hunt truffles?”

“Let us free the twins,” said Maglor. “If the Valar will not hear Eärendil because he’s bound, let’s free them soon. Haven’t I resisted long—it’s not because I pity her that I say, give them up. In pity I have stayed her bargaining, I say she should take counsel even with her foes, I say she must not batter herself to pieces on the rock. No, no! If I wanted to win her, why would I ever part her from her sons?”

“—a songbird, for the mines—”

“Neither hound nor bird, but I hope an ally. If we send her sons to Círdan and Gil-Galad, she may agree…”

“Why, that’s so. She would agree to anything.”

“Is it madder to make trade with a dead man, or to—” She touched her lips and smiled. “If you would receive Eärendil, still we should pass to Sirion. He’ll come there sooner.”

Maedhros listened.

“And what’s more, we can’t fare on without a stronghold, and we’ve found no stronghold but a baited trap, but have eaten through much plunder; and soon enough will starve in our fine mail. This was our last throw. We might have won a better footing at small cost to ourselves, but we traveled too slowly, lost too many, lacked a blessing, or there was never any road to take. So. When we turn back, it must be by the Mouths—even if we only go to nurse our grievance in the shade of Taur-im-Duinath. We don’t need the twins. Say rather, we can’t _keep_ the twins, for they’ll die or be lost, without we turn aside; will we turn aside? Eärendil will come so long as Elwing remains to us. And you were never content to wait so long as you may have to. If Vingilot follows the fleet. If Vingilot sank. And you, too, have seen we can’t continue as we are, hand in ring with a captive who hopes to undo us—which I knew from the first. So you’ll listen to me.”

“The oath says not that we may not bide,” he said, as he had often said, in better times. “Just turn back?”

“Turn back.”

“Sirion, then. Why did we ever leave?”

“You remember. So we wouldn’t be caught.”


	2. Chapter 2

They did retreat; and, dust-like, wargs rose off of the dry plains. Sudden fantastic figures came pouncing down the path, while crows followed in an arrow, at times, and sometimes were a billowing pall. Fortunately the wargs loathed fire and had no lords to lash them into the teeth of the foe. But his people marched in a haze of smoke, guarded by outriders with torches; it was like the long years of the Bragollach, when they patrolled the pass without cease, and a boy ran down the lines with a covered pail, soldiers wetting and replacing the kerchiefs over their mouths. Not so evil was their case as they fared back toward Sirion, yet Maglor was, if possible, grimmer, like having made him yield she feared to lose by it, after losing so much at his behest.

Whatever reconciliation came about, following the sad truce in the woods, it was accomplished by Elwing, in a series of gestures Maedhros understood as a single image: picked at, unwoven, woven again. Maglor took Elwing aside and told her that, if she would swear to help them in their quest, the twins would go to Círdan and the safety of the Isle. Elwing was attentive, slow to answer, then full of simple thanks, to which Maglor would nod insensibly. Then Maglor said: hast ever craved revenge upon a greater enemy? Elwing took her hands and said without shyness, You are my dearest enemy. Maglor didn’t at first hear her; when she did, her shoulders narrowed, her hands jerked, she shuddered as a sentry who spurns sleep. Once—not the first or second time they attempted this settlement—she jumped up, crying, “The dart found its true home, don’t spend your arrows!” but sat again when Elwing was silent. And so on, and so forth, in spare hours and stolen asides on the looping retreat, slower and more perilous than the flight north, and which involved feats of organization he forgot once accomplished; whereas he recalled the journey north very often, and it was clear to him they had been herded. But they killed what followed, and what barred their way. Before they left the cliff with its view of Eglarest, Maglor through her arts enchanted the whale: transformed tall ribs into spears, busy guts into a corpse-heap. There was less time for planning an assault on Angband’s gates. He knew of one other answer Elwing had made to Maglor: “Your hope would be the river, and to sail to Serech.”

Elwing, in turn, must have spoken to her children. After they were so angry that they wouldn’t be parted from her, or speak to her, until that night she told them stories of her grandparents, and of Gondolin, which she seemed to recall as well as she did Doriath. Once or twice she made mention of the Valar, and Gil-Galad’s prowess in arms: when you’re older he’ll make you his knights, and you’ll march with a shining host. I would have sent you there in a year if no foes came to trouble us. But they rightly discarded this as pap, and fidgeted and grew pale, until she turned again to the past; then they listened for clues. She spoke all through the night. The day after, the children couldn’t walk, and had to sleep in the wagons, covered in her cloak.

That was the day they passed under the eaves of Nimbrethil. In Nimbrethil, after dread and doubt, he felt himself once more in a clean country. Not merely a place which, great protection withdrawn from it, had still to be ravaged; but a fair young wood with virtue set about the roots. But a wolf had followed them that, also young, showed none of its fellows’ aversion to fire. It wasn’t in fact a true wolf, or exactly a wolf; it ran very low to the earth, on legs which it might have been hard-pressed to straighten, but it went swiftly when it chose—it had a long flat body too, a flat dished head, sleek fur. When it fell on their party it hadn’t slain the sentries but evaded their notice. It issued from the brush and stopped when light fell on it; it moved again, and but for that might have been a skin, a shed gray mantle.

His first mistake was to assume it couldn’t jump. It couldn’t; but, though Elwing was mounted, at the smell of the wolf the mare bolted, and Elwing lost her seat. His own Bruidal would have reared, but he dismounted. The wolf parted its jaws like a snake.

Maedhros caught it by the scruff and flung it away. Or such was his intent; the wolf twisted in his grip and reached out: its hooked claws snagged on the scales of his hauberk, and pierced his leather arm-guards, and it lunged for his neck.

He dropped backward, falling as well as he could. The wolf was briefly wedded to him, and couldn’t itself escape. But he had no way of reaching his sword; it needed all his strength to keep those long teeth from his throat. He heard Bruidal snort, whinny, and circle—any headlong trampling would dash his brains out too.

Where was Elwing? She might have been dead of a broken neck, but it didn’t occur to him. She came up from behind the wolf and sat, unsteadily. She paid no mind to its lashing tail or his efforts to kick it away. Instead, she set to working its great paw free from his armor. It took no time but was counted out in sounds, one for the rasp of his breath, one for the wolf’s tongue sliding past its lip: he and it both tensed when she gripped its hard ankle, and... When it was free, it stepped on Maedhros’s face, wrenched from his grip, scrambled over him and fled. Elwing leaned to inspect damage to his armor: there was blazing delight in her face, triumph and readiness.

Hoofbeats had been approaching, still approached; he blinked blood from his eyes, and it was Maglor on Elwing’s horse, with the wolf’s corpse draped like a pennant on her spear, which she must have commandeered from her guard. She had skewered the wolf from above as it rushed past her: its torn belly smiled round the spike. Galloping on, she almost trampled Maedhros, but pulled up hard and brought the horses round, and alighted nimbly some six paces from his head.

He rolled to one side and sat up. Elwing was standing, cloak drawn around herself. He sluiced some blood around from his nose and sucked in breath. The wolf smelled no different dead than alive. It had smelled dry, like dust, and when its hot breath smote him where he lay, its force wasn’t in its life but in its sour repleteness: the foul neglect, the caverns of the earth.

Nevertheless, he would have preferred that she not deposit her kill at his feet. She had to brace her boot on its ribcage to extract the broad spearhead, and by the time she succeeded the point had been eaten away, and the corroded iron gave off smoke. Yet armed with just the haft, and laying down the haft, she still was warlike. It was the first time she had slain a foe since Sirion. She couldn’t seem to decide with whom she was angrier, brother, hostage, or spear: she swabbed his brow with the cloth kept on hand to clean her sword, and to Elwing she said, “You should have run after your horse.”

“So, so,” Elwing said. She seemed distracted. She whistled to the mare and stroked her neck. “Yes, but better so,” she remarked. “For I am under your protection.”

After that they put her in the wagons with her children, and let it be spread about that she had saved his life, to boost morale. And at last the birchwoods dwindled behind them, and Balar spread green on their right hand. It was the height of summer. They shouldered aside reeds and their progress was marked by a twitching of flag-tops, a long tasseled carpet of sky. They went double-file, leading the horses on foot. When they came to a ridge, the rapids far off darted Sirion with white, like the feathered underside of dense embroidery.

There he asked Elwing for a showing of her power. Let her cast down the tower her people had built, in token of her will to aid them, and forgive past wrongs.

He expected her to refuse. He hadn’t warned Maglor what he intended, and Maglor would have protested had they not stood before their followers, and even so she bent her fingers back to keep herself from speech. But Elwing agreed. When they made their way down to the ruins, she directed Maglor’s steward to what remained to be salvaged: a mirror, several tapestries, her loom. She asked that the children not be made to watch, and she left them in Maglor’s care: left alone at the base of the tower, she took off her cloak. She stood, he thought, too close to the walls, a little sun-clad figure; but when she declared herself, the tower fell like a fountain playing—the bricks toppled outward, ring by ring, and clattered down the walls to _land_ in rings, except some as rolled down to the calm sea. The terrible thing was the noise of its fall, as brick scraped loose: slower as it sank on its foundations. The children were more afraid than they would have been if they allowed to go out of the tent. They clung to Maglor, hiding their faces plainly in her hand, or they paced and stopped their ears. And they shouted questions: In the—in the—In the Battle under Stars, is this what it was like? and in the Glorious Battle, was there so much sound? When the havens fell, they asked each other, neither boy giving any sign that he remembered: when the havens fell, is this what it was like?

Maedhros stood with his back to the entrance, blocking the door, but at that he turned. By way of experiment, he covered Elros’s ears for him. But the noise stopped. Elros clawed at his wrists and ran out.

The tower was a flat sprawl of brick, the pit laid bare. Elwing sat in the path and covered her face.

Maedhros retrieved Elros, but sent two of her attached guards to help her back. He greeted her with a wave of his prosthetic hand. She leaned heavily on her escort; a lock of her hair—faded to a reddish-brown from long days in the open—stuck to her cheek; but she nodded to him.

“Still with us?” he said. “Then we’ll send to Círdan under a white sail.” But she had dropped asleep while he was speaking, and hung upon her guards’ linked arms.

In fact, they would have to deliver her sons to the isle in a fishing boat, like a parcel or a rumor of war. Elros and Elrond, discovering out of loud darkness that their mother had unmade the castle, were beside themselves with excitement: they woke her despite their best efforts to be quietly amazed, which he didn’t think they would have done a mere two months before. But she sat up and accepted a waterskin, and went back to a sounder sleep, with an open mouth. And Elros soon after fell back into his temper, which without infecting Elrond made him fretful; but Elros lay on his face on the mats and wouldn’t speak. The tent flaps were thrown open. More water was brought, and experimentally splashed onto Elros’s arm; but he laid his head on his arms and did nothing. Elrond gave Maedhros a haggard look, not quite a scowl: he had no faith in Maedhros, and was a child, and couldn’t even trust that Maedhros didn’t know the cure. But neither did he wait long. He whispered something in Elros’s ear, first coaxingly, then with vindictive force: Maedhros would have paid it no mind, except the boy was speaking Quenya.

“Be he foe or friend, be he foul or clean, brood of Morgoth or bright Vala, Elda or Maia or Aftercomer… Man _yet_ unborn on Middle-Earth… neither law, nor love, nor league of swords, dread nor danger, not Doom itself, shall defend him from Fëanor, and Fëanor’s kin, whoso hideth or hoardeth, or in hand taketh, finding keepeth or afar casteth a Silmaril.”

Elros got his brother by the hair, and pulled himself up—Elrond gave a squawk of dismay. Elros shouted, “This swear we all: death we will deal him ere Day's ending, woe unto world's end!”

They turned and looked at him.

Here then was what he had quested for, that long night in the woods: two dark heads, and great eyes in pinched faces. A branching shadow with no heads at all. He had done nothing but grow used to them, and to be alone with them, both awake, was like being toyed with by a fever, when the dead came to hold vigil over him, and begged him to admit they still lived: when he unwillingly gave tongue to his false hope, hope came in and stung him while he lied. The twins weren’t watching him to trick him into lying. They were being brave, which he felt like a stew. Two children who parroted words they knew to be forbidden, who searched for any words that they could overpower—and yet not so, for they hadn’t named Eru. Only a fool would believe they didn’t know him. Maedhros the tall.

Elrond said, “Do we have it right?”

But with them, at least, he had kept the habit of silence, and went out.

It was with the oath idly tangling in his ears that he made the arrangements for their passage. He hadn’t sworn to retrieve the jewels, but to punish thieves; well, I’ve punished them, he told the oath. Day is not done. If, as sometimes before, his father’s voice had chided him, he could have answered; for he was a true son. But in the children’s shrill rendition it was only words. It was worse as words: it had a reality equal to, and mingled with, the soughing wind and the pilot’s square face, the fragments of her history which came to him as he gave her her orders. But the oath was older than the pilot and the small white sun, and to hear it plain made the rest obscure, like he walked in memory: somewhere his blind feet bore him through an unknown country, wandering. He couldn’t think where to go. The twins—it was as if he had killed them and planned a kingly burial: allied with him late, they were his counsellors once dead, who could warn him of everything he knew.

(“I live!” said all the dead. “I live, I live!” Then I ought to hunt you a second time.)

This unusual impression passed. The winds were favorable by afternoon, the waves high but not too high, turning both rough and glossy hollows to the open. “You remember Gil-Galad,” Elwing informed the twins.

“No,” offered Elrond. Elwing looked to Elros. Elros shook his head.

“You must. He is so high—” she gestured vaguely at Maedhros; Maedhros had never met Gil-Galad, but he doubted it “—and fierce, with dark hair and blue eyes like very stars.”

“That’s not enough, Mama.”

“Away with you!” She bit her lip. “But not yet. Well, what about Círdan? He’s all over silver, but not old.”

Elrond squinted. “...A boat…?”

“Yes! You’ll do well enough if you remember that. Ask after his ships. We had his help with Vingilot, although you will find his longships not so fair. But that’s not his fault; he’s an artist, he lives in bad times, as do we all. Hmm.”

Maedhros had thought the question was if Círdan _was_ one of his ships.

They had made some friends in the camp, whether they willed it or no, and now burly men-at-arms and starved hunters had gathered to say farewell, and to reclaim or hand back trifles: that’s my plume, are you making off with _my_ plume? Then you must take this pearl button as well, to fix it to your cap. The physician who’d tended Elwing came bearing an ancient nasal speculum, long a source of fascination for the twins, who reacted with hardened calm and accepted it practically when he apologized for its poor make. Last of all these petitioners, Maglor came and gave Elrond her traveling-harp.

“I’ll build another,” she said. “I have to, for the work ahead. I’m sorry I never taught you to make a harp. Although, to be sure, it’s an apprenticeship of a hundred years.”

“Thank you,” said Elrond, muffled by a noseful of harp-casing, and leaning under the burden. Elwing helped him load it into the canoe. Elros came forward and bowed very low, to Maglor and to Maedhros, and with his nose still near the ground his eye lit on Maedhros, with the same searching calm he’d turned on the physician: I might do it differently, now I know how you’ve done it. Elrond, finding Elros with his hair trailing in the sand, bowed correctly and gave his brother a kick. He was sore from the morning’s crisis and his relief, it could be seen, sprung out as this ungentle handling. For some reason the threatened squabble made Maglor redden.

“Peace, Maglor,” said Elros, watching out of the corners of his eyes to learn if she could weep. Elrond was kinder. He looked at her straight-on, brows furrowed—he’d get a crick in his neck—and said,

“Elwing will keep you safe.”

He broke and smiled afterward, pleased with his solemn tone.

“You have it right,” Maglor announced, her back to Maedhros. “She’s our security.”

Maedhros nodded to the twins and went to give the pilot final instructions; his sister followed at his heel, glancing over her shoulder as she went. For a second time he beheld Elwing through her eyes, but there was now no overripe vividness, no flaw of color or boundary; she was recording the matter with faithful intention, the sun, the stink that whetted sight and sound while killing appetite, the flat mud, the sumptuous beadwork out on the tide, the rushes speaking. Nearest to hand, the river’s braided channels, that tapered to black veins through all the silt. And Elwing; brown as the mud, reddish-haired as the tall green reeds would redden after summer, her cape half-soaked from trailing in pools—she was all out of practice being queen of Sirion.

She knelt. Dry-eyed, she folded the twins into a difficult embrace: there were repeated adjustments, rearrangements, backpatting, it seemed necessary that each side of each face be pressed in turn against her neck, no eye left blind to the warmth of her shoulder; and Elros’s head, after all, got stuck somewhere between Elrond’s brooch and her arm; but all of that was no affliction, he remembered dimly, it was a way to prove that you were held.

“Mama!” Elrond cried out, at the end; but he had spoken too early, and could get out nothing else once he was lifted over the side. Elros climbed in after him, having gotten over all his rueing by midmorning: only he said, holding his brother’s hand, “You should go with us. Why can’t you?”

“Because I wish to fight,” she said, still crouched. “Not now, but soon. And I swore an oath. When I fulfill it, I’ll surely escape. It’s too soon to part; but if I go I’ll never leave you. Your father’s gone to fetch an army, and who will guide them? If you need me, think of me, for I also need you. Tell Círdan—tell Círdan, I commit you to his care, and my heart is glad you will be fostered there. And keep warm, my dears; you should always wear a cloak. Elrond, tell your brother. And if Gil-Galad wishes to teach you the spear, tell him I’ve said, not until you are ten. And—”

But they couldn’t delay so long as it would take to speak her heart, or for the twins to tire of it. They listened with an unconcealed impatience, eager for her to finish dissembling and board the canoe. And they each refused to meet the other’s eye, a sure sign that they hid from a terrible foe—they were somewhere secret—if they locked eyes they might laugh, and be betrayed. They were very somber. In short they strove to stay, if not to hear. Maedhros tapped her shoulder and gestured toward the sun. She had written a packet of letters for every lord on the Isle. With luck she might write more.

She said again, “Someday I will escape,” and pushed the canoe into the water. The pilot almost fell off the prow, but took up her oar. The twins stood up at the stern, but they didn’t jump out. But Elros had the flag of Eärendil from the tower, and shook it to catch the wind. Elrond beside him waved, and looked forward to the boat that would bear them, looked back and then forward, and back again without his same clear face: the canoe had slid away, and now his brow shone but his eyes were in shadow. Then he stepped up on the seat and waved both arms over his head, and almost fell, but his brother steadied him. Only when they passed under the reed-tunnel did they sit, not to lose their hats.

Elwing stood a while shading her eyes, and when the pilot raised the white sail she dropped her hand and watched on. Maglor made conversation near her: your sons are very wise, your sons are brave. With a chill, Maedhros understood that he would meet the twins again.

“Now will we hear your vow?” he asked. He had forgotten to ask it before.

“Surely,” said Elwing. “You’ve freed my sons and cared for them, sheltered them and honored them; therefore I will serve you, in your war on hell. Whenever you have need of me, I’ll go to your aid. Hear me, Varda and Manwë, on the holy mountain. If I break this oath, may I...” She shrugged. “My life is forfeit.”

They hadn’t marked Amras’s grave, for fear that survivors might return and scatter his bones, but Maedhros knew where it lay because he knew the lie of the horizon, standing at his brother’s head. The mass graves to the east. The Isle and stone sea-stacks, grouped unevenly under a web of stars.

That night the beacon was lit at the summit of the Isle. Then, shortly after, the far faint flame went out, and a storm blew over the bay. Elwing said, “My tower.” But there were other houses of brick and dugouts higher up, away from the river, and they took shelter in the ruins.

It rained all night. He woke up before Maglor’s watch ended, and saw his captive leaning by the window. She was not now the woman he had met up in the tower, her face scarred underneath with a tracery of light. The shutters were bolted. He knew her by the beam from his bright glance, which brushed her arm, dusted her cheek—which her hair drank, growing lustrous enough to be again dark hair, and not a shadow.

“Now will you leave us?” he said, and had to repeat himself to be heard above the storm. “Since your sons are safe?”

“I don’t think you understand,” she said, not quite shouting. “I’m afraid to die.”

Sleepily he thought, that was what Maglor said, stealing your knife from you. But he was wrong, of course; Maglor had said, I don’t want to. He beckoned to Elwing, and she began to pace. So perhaps he didn’t hear all of what followed; but he believed he heard enough.

“I was afraid from the first. I thought I should cast myself into the sea with the stone; I was alone, I couldn’t leave the tower, I would be seized, and killed, and the stone stolen. But you took so long. All about my home the battle raged—it was my home, dying and bleeding. But no one came. I waited. I wanted—I _prayed_. I prayed you would spring out from behind a curtain to kill me. And if you didn’t, if you failed at your stroke, I would climb up, I would climb to the window.

“I tried to set my foot upon the sill. Why, and my shoulders wouldn’t fit the arch, standing; how then should I jump? I was so afraid I would fall and die on the stones, and not reach the sea. And the Silmaril would be taken from my body. Or perhaps I would live, or live a while, the blood running from my brain. Better to die on your sword. Anything. Once cut by your sword I could flee it. I prayed you would come!

“And then I heard you on the stair. I wouldn’t go. I didn’t move. That was the room where I bore my children, where my husband loved me, where my maidens crowned me, and I had my life. Why not stay? I couldn’t remember, it was so simple. The stone was heavy, so I threw it to the waves.”

He rose from his pallet. “Liar!” he said in some surprise.

Then he had to wonder if he’d spoken: for she didn’t stir. He had no way to tell her that he wasn’t a fool. Not only was he sane, he wasn’t even a fool. He knew what it was to lose all, to discover one’s duty late and fail—to flee duty by staying, to flee and hold to the course. But after all, she wouldn’t thank him for his promises: in time, you won’t want to be brave? First you were afraid and wanted to, made pledges out of terror, but desired to break them, and were even impatient of yourself; and in time, you’ll be wholly afraid?

He had a confused, sudden recollection of Fingon taken up by the eagle, and the madness of panic: kill me! Kill me! Don’t leave me here. How he had struggled, as the blade scratched at steel, and Fingon, caught in the eagle’s claw—he had thought Fingon would fall—

“Where then was the voice of Ulmo?”

“I made it up,” she said matter-of-factly. “Is it not obvious? I told myself I heard it, so I heard it. Isn’t that enough?”

He asked why she was awake.

“I am trying to think who lived here.” She rubbed the back of her neck, under her hair, and then closed her hands in a half-collar behind her back. “Whoever it was, they may have lived, for they bore away their pots. Or it was thieves. I suppose the dead will own me for a guest. My mother bid my brothers keep me. When Eärendil sailed, he told my sons, Protect your mother. But I survive alone, and now… But as for me, I think I’ll live forever.”

He might have fallen asleep. If you go north with us, he thought, we’ll share a grave.

“So I’ll do what you ask. I mean to go on doing it. I hate you, but you took pity on me, and where else shall I turn?”

“Why do you feel you must lie? Who are you lying to?”

She laughed, but it was strangled. Clutching her hair, she said at last, “You aren’t listening. Who else remains?”

*

The rain lengthened through dawn to shed a fine gray moult on morning, although it was no longer so cold. He went out, wondering whether the pilot, across the bay, was enjoying her breakfast with Círdan’s people. The reeds, crushed flat by the weight of their soaking, were not so sad a sight as the grey river, lifted to the height of a raised road, the straight road he had wished for, broad enough for twenty men and rutted, pitted, with the rain. Here and there it grew pink tongues from floating sediment. Not far from the former castle he found the clay pits where its brick was dug, gargling red.

As for the bricks in the heap, they gained softer edges. “Is this any weather for music-making?” said Maglor, on the third day of the storm.

He hadn’t met much with her in that time. He was preoccupied with seeing that his people had their daily dole, and twice that, ere it rotted. No lodging held: the ruins were not built for such an onslaught, though most of the town’s structures had withstood the sack. Sirion’s mouths enjoyed mild winters, drank of mists rather than showers, and had, for the past half a century, only prospered in the drought. But all that was ended, and in places the ground collapsed. Close quarters bred violent spats, and turned the embers of old grievances: Maedhros learned that the physician had once courted the absent pilot, and now lamented her absence—learned it, to his bewilderment, when the physician staggered into his tent with a blacked eye, had from the pilot’s husband. He had never seen a doctor so cheerful. Others weren’t roused to strife but sank into a kind of reverie, moving with care along the overgrown paths, blurred to shadows as well by the sheeting rain.

And Maglor was again dreary company, now that the twins were gone. But her little steward had requested an audience, just as if they were two princes, parading for an army. He thought it must be to some purpose.

Maglor seemed to have summoned herself to complain about the weather. Also to sharpen her reclaimed sword. As ever, her misery took a whimsical turn when she desired to spread it to others. He had no patience for her boredom, no stomach for her sickness, and nothing better to do.

“I think it not one storm,” she went on, pushing her sword up the whetstone in long shuttle-strokes. “Or if it is one storm, it’s one storm many times over. The tide sucks out the flood, the sky bestows it, but really, Maedhros...”

“Is that not music?”

“Very well,” she allowed, “if you can pick low fruit, you must be feeling hopeful.” She held out the sword for him to test, and he obliged her by lifting one side of his map and sawing into the Great Sea.

“Wasteful,” she said with a half-smile.

He considered the scroll, which showed the river and its courses, fifty years ago, and was forested besides with lost messengers’ warnings. Also it sported mold. “Do you regret your harp?”

“I repent what’s left more than what’s lost. All instruments are a hindrance to composition.” She went from behind the camp table and put her cold dry hands over his ears, as he had done for Elros. “Do you still hear the rain?”

“Yes.”

“Now listen,” and removing her fingers she put her mouth to his ear, and he heard nothing at all, but a silence that opened a door. He bore it, but set sword and map down. She put one arm around his shoulders, and through her side he felt the hum of whatever sound she made, that conquered sound. Maglor somewhat meekly drew away when she ran out of breath; her eyes were narrowed with intent, her mouth was rounded, but the noise of the rain marched back, shaking its spears. But still he heard the silence. It was as if she’d shown him where it could be found, rather than devising it. So his father had held him up to inspect the weave of tapestries: see that curve, this flourishing ripple, and all supported by the straight road underneath.

“You couldn’t have discovered this in time to calm the twins?”

“Yes, well,” she said, “I was thinking of them.”

What a weapon she had found: not power, but infamous secrecy, that could but draw the notice of all ears—in this hall delved through music, and even now shaken by clanging song. “Is this what you’ve been working on? But I hoped to hear your song: the song to topple Morgoth! And then… Will you suggest we free Elwing?”

“How should I, when she’s our weapon? And isn’t it her fate to cast down Angband’s gates, and break the peaks of Thangorodrim?”

“I thought you’d be happy. She has power enough to merit the attempt.”

“You knew it, and I knew it; and am I to be glad, if my brother lays waste—destroys a stronghold we fought to take, and for no cause...”

That was no stronghold, he should have said. That was built by Turgon’s daughter, a jewel to please her child’s wife, as good to us as tinder to the orcs. Then Maglor would have reminisced. But he said, “I didn’t destroy it. I admit I wanted to. But as for you, you have no reason to love it; remember it was the scene of our defeat.”

Maglor rubbed her forehead. “Will you then drown Beleriand, and Aman in its time?”

He noted her pain from a long way off, and gave thought to how to mend it.

“I think I used to be thriftier,” he acknowledged. “Maybe I am mad.” It wouldn’t serve; Maglor still watched the door. “Neither do I plan to die,” he offered. “I wish to win the jewel. We’ve done enough evil.”

Maglor looked at him closely. “In fact, you don’t seem weary,” she said.

“I am not.” Cold, and his skin was clammy, but his joints were limber, it was his armor that creaked. His scalp itched with a sodden, flaky itch, dull but spreading.

“Do you hate our oath?”

She said it formally, as if prompting an initiate in the rite’s exchange. “Yes,” he said. “But what matter? I have no other oath to keep. Without it, I might have died in my captivity.” He had never said so to anyone; until he spoke, it didn’t occur to him that he hadn’t told Maglor, and that therefore he was tightening the fit of the idea. Whether he had ever believed it was overset by how much he had thought that it was right, forming the habit of the thought in all completeness: or else he could make no sense of that time, if—to let Fingon save him—the gods had wasted a blessing. Could the gods have bad luck? He waited to learn if his guess would strike her as frivolous. In what world were they without the oath? she might well ask.

She paced from one end of the table to the other, stopped, and came around to his side, where she tipped her head back in such surprise that she must only then have heard him. She held her hand to the back of her head as if feeling for a bruise.

“We felt your loss, you know. But then none of us swore to retrieve you.”

“Not even I!”

At that she burst out in a giggle, which he met with a wide-eyed half-grin. “What have we done?” she said, marveling, and put a finger to the map. “Abandoned you,” she tapped the mountains, “and held the north, and lost the north, and lost the war;” circling downward, “gained not the jewel at Doriath, nor Sirion, and seized Elwing the White. Thereupon we led her north, until indeed we must have seemed a little light in a black country; and home again, and made home strange to her… Actually I think I was wrong to urge the twins’ release. Or if I judged right, still I am sorry. We took them into the wild, and dragged them hither and yon, and of course she would have done anything to have them better-guarded; but when we took them home, I think she would rather have kept them. And now she’s sworn to us, our loyal liege, and still our captive. What a strange tale!”

She paused as if the truth had occurred to her. But she said nothing more about Elwing. From the corner of her eye she looked through him, then looked straight ahead, with her damp hair tamped to her brow. “Even to the end of days, I will be glad that you escaped.” She said it as though he’d done it of his own will: cut his hand from his wrist, and climbed down. “Though we be tossed into darkness, broken limb from limb, and devoured, let us say, by our word—though having come to this, we may fall lower: still it will be good that you escaped.”

That lie bit him so deeply he had no knowledge of it: its barb had found a place that did not feel. He had still less use for the part he could touch, like a hilt broken off from its blade. Later he would remember that she had spoken so at such a time, without, as he supposed, any thought of his listening; he would think her after all his sister, who hated to admit when she had lost.

“Does she blame you?”

She took hold of the edges of the table. “No; she will speak only of her sons. Having now no power to help her, I receive her confidences. Do I suppose they are well, there are children on the isle, but not many, and such children as there are the twins will soon outgrow... Well, in a hundred years, Elrond will be a great warrior and a scholar, and Elros will be a very uncomfortable houseguest. Perhaps a seer. Or that’s what I would say were they elves. Closer than that, foresight doesn’t touch. If not for you, I would of course give myself up; then at least I could answer her questions.” Without turning she reached back and nudged his hook.

“Here are many reminders of her grief.”

“I don’t think she can forget. Nor would I take more from her, even unto a memory.” Maglor hesitated. “If the Valar come... it may be they’ll forgive us, who are the last defenders of this land; and Eärendil may restore the jewel to us. And then I would release her from her oath.” She took back the sword. “Not now, for being sworn to us, she’s more free than she was.”

She was untrue, and her happiness was ash, and her restiveness was ash, not a living shudder but the tremors of scoured earth; but still, she was there before him, like water in a chasm. She wasn’t him, and still she wore his own unwithered face.

“For now,” said Maedhros, “I think it time we should depart. No one could land in such a storm.”

*

At sunset, the sky cleared. The sea grew smooth, was an outflung arm, resting on the shore’s low shoulder. By then preparations were underway to break camp come the morning. Maedhros let that go on. Night fell, their campfires guttered, and a light rose in the west.

There was no storm, though the wind was very strong. The air was fresh and free, not bitter, not tensed for a blow. He felt curiously balked and very eager, as when spotting a blind spot in his teacher’s theorem. There was, it was true, a band of darkness over the spark: Vingilot sailed under the darkness of thunderclouds because all the stars of night couldn’t withstand the Silmaril, penned alive beneath them.

When the ship laid anchor, he gave orders that Maglor and Elwing be summoned. He exchanged his hook for his best hand, inlaid with bronze. Then he bid his people clear the beach.

Eärendil’s longboat touched to shore with a long sound. He leapt out, the jewel strapped to his brow. His jerkin glittered with sea-spray, his shoes with fine sand. Each hair of his head was frosted like a willow-leaf on its underside, his brow and cheek were stained the supple white of snow, his eyes flicked as stars on a lofted shield, and he had a split lip.

In fact, both he and Vingilot were much the worse for wear. Not that much could be seen of the ship, now that its torch-bearer had debarked; but it sat low in the water, slack sails snapping in the wind.

Here was not the herald of the Host of the West. But Maedhros, driven by a thirst that made him talkative, a desperate need which he vied to drown out: “Hail Eärendil, of mariners most renowned! Are you lost? For I heard you sought Valinor.” In his mind he was thinking—knowing it to be false—Here comes Eonwë. Here come trumpets, justice, lightning-bolts to boil the bay. Eärendil as well will be swallowed by the wave: before I can reach him. Now. Now. Now.

“I seek my wife.”

“You’ve found her. She’s here, she awaits you, though she may be at a loss for how to array herself in welcome, when you come all adorned in her great jewel. How did it come to you? Did Ulmo bear it up on a great wave? We combed the marshes, but…”

“We cut it out of a giant fish,” said Eärendil.

“Ah!” But Elwing had not yet arrived, to hear this significant testimony. Eärendil gave Maedhros a look of deep dislike.

Then Maglor came, leading the prisoner. She brought no guards, as he had ordered, though she wore her sword, and Elwing’s wrists were tied. That was orc-work, but Maglor prized efficiency. Elwing wore no jewels, of course, but she must have been a fair enough sight to Eärendil; he wordlessly reached for the clasp of the Nauglamír, but faltered when she turned from him.

She spoke.

“How could you? How _could_ you? If you had gone to Círdan you would have seen your sons are safe. I sent them there. And you, you too were safe, and it with you, and finally I did what should be done—and now you’re here—”

Eärendil had been unwinding the Nauglamír from his hair while she talked. When he answered, he began calmly, but his voice rose. “I feared to pluck your hand imperishable out of a fish.” He coughed. “A fish’s gullet. Elwing!”

He cast the jewel at her feet.

It glared in the sand like a chunk of glass, bright but not much brighter than the sand, because now all the beach was alive with its silver, like the light that shoots forth at the end of a storm, aimed through arrow-loops in cloud; and like that light it warmed and widened, growing yellow as wine. Then the sand was clean flour, the reeds were the new green of shoots, deepening to summer-green where now the darkness failed. Maedhros reached down with the wrong hand. His metal fingers clinked against the stone. As he lifted it, so great was his attention, he was aware of nothing save the added weight on his stump, and then a growing heat.

For one instant he thought: my hand! The skin had healed and grown back: the flesh had been made whole. How else to explain this ring of warmth, that fit the wound but extended past it? He held the Silmaril in his remade hand. So this is why I swore!

Then he thought nothing, because of the pain. It was the pain of imprisonment; the worse pain, still to come, was the long fall. For now his wrist was crushed by his great weight. It was burnt by his blood, torn by his strength, and the steel bond was what held it firm, so it didn’t char away. Here was his punishment.

Light-fingered, his sister plucked the stone from out his iron grip. She caught it in two hands, hissed, and covered it with her fingers, which made her hands a lamp; and then she would have fallen. But he caught her, badly, and lowered her. She screamed when the hot metal of the prosthesis brushed her neck. He could not say to himself yet, whether the pain was less or greater, for her torment filled his thoughts. At once he wished that he might take her burden back and pocket it. He could then take her hands and kneel before her, as when he was young and she a child. _Eyes up, Maglor._ But she with a great, undignified struggle half-righted herself in a crouch; and wildly though she looked about her eyes never met his. A coward all through childhood, a friend in the long war—his sister; he felt her mind reach up to his, adding her weight to his weight.

“Elwing,” she called, “go now to your lord.”

Elwing ran. She was a scuff of white at the edge of his vision, and the scrape of quick steps. He still looked for her where she’d been, until he heard her speak.

“What ails you?”

For Eärendil, untying Elwing’s hands, had cried out as though the blood flowed back into his own chilled flesh. “It’s nothing,” Maedhros heard him say. “I haven’t slept in—oh, well… There was such a storm.”

Go, Maedhros thought, why are you dallying? The argument went on without permission. Elwing said: “You didn’t think _the storm_ was a sign from the gods?”

“The Silmaril led me.”

“It would guide you anywhere; even to the deeps of the sea.”

No longer bound, she supported her beloved to the boat. By the end both hobbled. When she had lain him in it, she turned away and screamed. It wasn’t a word, but words followed.

“I curse you! May you eat your dead. May you slay each other. May your dead rise, may you drink bitter water, may the moon follow you, and the stars— _a hîr annûn gilthoniel_ , _le linnon im Tinúviel!_ ”

Maglor gave a low groan. Elwing’s expression stiffened without changing; it was as though she had sprung aside, out of the way of a bolt. She removed Eärendil’s slack arm from her neck and whispered: “Wait for me.” And strode back toward them.

Maglor sat on her heel, Maedhros leaning on her to steady her. The smell of her hands was like the feast the curse denied them, a rich board.

His heart grown too large for his chest, his chest tender under his mail. It wasn’t pity. Had they needed the jewel to teach them this? It seemed they had, for he still doubted it—not whether their hands were unclean, but that the jewel could change. If he picked it up again, perhaps the pain would go. But he didn’t believe that; what he believed was that he felt less pain now, and that he might feel still less given time. For this moment he was afraid of losing all respite, not like any fear born of pride: not like the threat of ruin, and not like falling short. _Keep this. Let me keep it longer. Soon I shall be brave._ But he also thought, Her hands—what good is it to burn those hands?

Elwing said, “Give it to me. That isn’t forbidden by your oath.”

He would take it back when Maglor made another sound.

Maglor’s eyes were slitted. Her lips moved, and she licked them, because the thick salt tears wormed from her nose. She would muzzle Elwing with the secret of her voice; no, she would not, she had forgotten everything but pain. Finally she said, “But it will burn you.”

“No!” Elwing said.

She bent down and wrapped Maglor’s fingers in hers.

There was a scramble as Maglor pulled against, and Elwing drove Maglor’s hands together, and Maglor’s wrists sprang apart; Maglor was the stronger, and stronger in escaping. It almost slipped away from them both. But Elwing got the jewel from her, and bright red palms flew up: _please, don’t give it back!_ Maedhros stirred. Elwing thrust the jewel out in a circle like a torch, and he straightened and could not move.

She held their heirloom close again to study it, with pity.

“See? I am safe. Before you came, I wore it every day of my life,” she said, soft. All her limbs shook from a weight of weariness, her hunch the cost of how tall she had stood: but the Silmaril she held like an empty cup. “I wore it to get washing, as a girl. I wore it in the Havens in judgment and in peace. I took it off because I thought it better to lose it to the gods than you, but now I see it’s never left me, all this time. And you are safe, while it is still with me.”

She kissed Maglor’s palms with an ecstatic carelessness, the blood touching her mouth, and set the blood-smeared lace about her neck. “Give yourselves up,” and her voice became harsh, it was her voice again. “Delay no longer. For I have one more errand. Your reckoning will wait.”

Maglor’s blind stare didn’t drop: the light of her eyes had faded from the splendor of the jewel.

Maedhros said, “Stay!”

He waited for the oath to close its hand around his arm. While he waited, he took Maglor's sword.

“It isn’t hers to give.” Still he waited. “No gift at all, to give what we can’t claim.”

“It is!” Elwing gripped the jewel. “It is, if you love it!”

She ran, then stopped and looked over her shouder. She raised one arm as if hailing him, before running another few yards.

Maglor said hoarsely, “Maedhros.”

Elwing sought to draw him after. Why? He could have commanded her. It was what he would have done in the tower, if he had come there in time. He was tall, and much the elder, and evil things and bright spirits alike had fled from him. But…

“Maedhros!”

Laughing, standing his ground, he called out: “Elwing! Let us say we leave it to you.” His throat worked, dryer than he needed it to be; he would have given much for a cup of honey. “That makes two boons once granted, and when you’re gone we’ll suffer for it. Very well. Take the jewel,” he said, testing, “do with it what you will. Do you then owe us what was promised, to aid us in our quest?”

“I do.” Elwing had stopped in truth, sinking heel-deep into the wet silt. “Do you think his crown _won’t_ burn you?”

Maglor had his wrist before he could take one step more. He felt the soaked, torn paper of her palm. He tugged away from her and she looked at him with the madness of grief; she said his name as if it had a meaning. And then, when he would have struck her, she lay down under the blow, lay promptly on her side, ear in the mud. She then sang something, sullen, to the tide.

“What has that to do with it? No, let’s confer!” He shook himself and pointed with the sword. “...He is my oldest enemy. Why not sell a Silmaril to gain a Silmaril? I’ve paid before, that’s not so dear. And why not unmake every one—for these have hidden from me, have taken, have cast their light afar, and have been found. But I can’t let it go.”

“But you did,” she said.

Still he felt the dwindling of pain in his lost hand; it was no longer sweet, but like a sickening surfeit of pleasure, that, losing its shape, served instead to beat out time for this endless delay. Is it possible, he asked himself, that I haven’t done enough? It denies me because I am forsworn; I broke my oath from the first, when I fled Morgoth. _Though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you_ , and he heard the dead, begging for mercy.

Maglor was still singing, voice half-tumbled by the surf. Elwing didn’t make another sound; head cocked, she listened.

The song had borne some knowledge of the pain away from him. It hurt him, but he forgot what it meant. He couldn’t see Elwing’s face. She stood like a Tree, head in blossom, and there in the tide grew her mate, silver and green. If he slew her, the Silmaril might break, and Yavanna’s light slay all the stars. Yet his heart no longer leapt; he had forgotten the dream. Fear did nothing but parcel out his thoughts, it made him learn of a prison from which he couldn’t ask release, so that he was as though dying of fear, buried alive in an open grave, buried with the wind and the stars in leaf. It was terrible that she, last of all those children, should escape from him.

She turned and ran through the foam and he followed. With him went Maglor’s silence, that lay waiting under noise. Elwing stopped when she reached Eärendil. He had tried to bring the boat to her, and was slumped over the side, clutching the oar, but he still breathed—actually he was snoring. She stood by her husband like she had come upon him dead, having bid him hide himself from all their foes.

Maedhros ran her through.

She folded over the blade and gave a great harsh cough. Then she slid forward, but he sawed upward, hooking her on the steel. The light grew stronger, and she was silhouetted; he couldn’t see his hand on the hilt. As once before in years of dread he heard a thundering of wings.

Her feet lifted out of the water. The blade tipped up in her. Dripping, she rose—the crystal drops seemed to melt her flesh, drawing long her feet. Her white gown fluttered. Beaten back by wind, he felt a weight lift off of his sword, and then the sword itself pulled from his grasp.

*

When he came to himself, Maglor was nowhere to be seen.

From the snail-track in the mud, he surmised that she had dragged him out of reach of the tide, that he should not drown in a half-foot of water. Nevertheless the surf rinsed his back when the next tide climbed the slope. In the shock of the cold, face stung by dryness when all his skin was soaked, he began to weep. It was misery to awake, as it had been a misery after his torment, because however long he slept it was less than he wanted.

Now he felt a ring of pain around his stump, where the iron bit it. He cursed himself for having touched the jewel, for having fought to no purpose, and above all for the pain. To his despair, he heard his sobbing breaths, which grew louder as he grew more wretched, in contempt of his shame. Pity, he begged, pity! But tears dried and his whimpers went on.

It was morning. All his people had gone, whether for good and for an hour, he couldn’t say. Amras might come and mock him presently, if only he were not dead. If he didn’t rouse himself, they would both drown soon.

He tried to regret the loss of the sword. Whether or not he had succeeded in avenging himself on their victim, it would have been some good as a crutch.

Maglor returned just as he was considering sitting back down. He couldn’t move for fear he would fall over, and so held very still. She had tied back her hair, and was silent in the way of someone moving purposefully, alone—stealthy and silent as her tall shadow, that grew ragged on crushed reeds—then she looked at him in defeat, as if she hadn’t expected him to do her the kindness of staying in his swoon.

He was also filled with a feeling of refusal. Not you, he thought, not you: anyone but you. As before he had wished to save himself, so now he would have cried, Go! go! But by and by he understood that she had returned from indecision, not out of duty. Perhaps he could still drive her away.

“Did you pray to Ulmo to save her?”

“What? No. I begged him to spare you.”

Later they breakfasted by the tidepools, roasting anemones half-heartedly. He removed his prosthetic and found the joints were fused; he considered, but didn’t commit to, dropping it on a wandering crab. In the end he left it tucked on a bed of seagrass to rust. She sat patiently for him while he bathed her ruined hands in saltwater, wincing but only crying out when he removed them from the pool; all the while she watched him from the corner of her eye. Her hands being bandaged by his one clumsy hand, he felt she leaned with too much casualness on an elbow, skirts spread about her to dry. They had not had such a fine day that year, not since winter was swallowed by spring clouds, and his skin was turning pink from wrist to elbow. If he lectured, she would say, Thank you, mother.

Finally he brought himself to ask what had happened after he fell.

It took her some while to begin. She seemed not to have expected him to ask, and further to be remembering something that had happened a very long time ago: which she had recalled to herself so often, in glimpses—a wrong a hundred times repented, a hundred times corrected, in her thought—that it was now a great labor to say, here it began, and here ended. She said that Ulmo had transformed Elwing into a great white bird, with a star at her breast.

“The Silmaril?”

That got no reply, but she went on with her account: the bird had carried off Eärendil, who seemed surprised. And Elwing? Unaccountably joyful. She crowed in all the voices of the birds.

Then her mouth twitched. “Brother, I can’t believe I doubted whether you let her cast the Silmaril away! It was so difficult. And holding it was difficult too; but I could have borne it longer—not forever. I need not have given it up so soon… And yet I did, for it was heavy—and very beautiful. Have I broken our oath?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled now more soberly: was she imitating Elwing? She had come to some wrong decision. She was like a child who had victory thrust on it, when it had prided itself on bearing with defeat. What shall I do with this—turning over the gift—and for a while, putting it aside. But what was the gift? That Elwing lived? Not to have broken her oath? And that was strange, he thought; how had he kept his oath, and not his arms? He asked, “Did Ulmo also transform the sword?”

“The sword was lost to the waves. It slipped from her breast, and she rose—” Maglor covered her face. She shut her fingers against the day. “I can’t bear you,” she said.

“And I hate you,” he said, offhanded, to hide how he was stunned. He held out his arms, but she snatched them up in her bandaged hands, and they wrangled briefly. The tighter her grip, the more blood came through the bandages, and she panted from the pain. And pus squeezed from his stump. He put his wrists down before she could force them down. “Yes, I hate you. But that’s not all. Didn’t you hear her? We ought to slay each other. You cast afar the jewel, and I took it in hand. Get away from me.”

She scrambled backward. “Where do you go? I’ll pursue you, though there are none to help me do it. Our people scattered,” she added in an aside. “The wind off the sea was great and terrible, and so was the wave. But it only bore Vingilot away. Slay you? I'll bring you back to be judged, and then I may surrender. Where will you go? Kinslayer, oathbreaker, slayer of captives: who wouldn't follow you?” She was shaking her head, swinging it low, and her eyes trailed their brightness, but she no longer wept.

“Never mind. I’ll lie in ambush for you.”

“I’ll outwait you,” she said, to herself. She crossed her ankles and stooped to wash her face, too, in the stream. When she came up her lips were pursed against the salt. “Where will we go?”

“North,” he said, still hoping to scare her. “Where else?” He paused, thinking of Angband, and Maglor alone at his side. Was he afraid? “Not too far. I grow weary.”

“You!” said Maglor, outraged. “You’re immortal!”

**Author's Note:**

> OH! DEATH, WHERE IS THY STING-A-LING-A-LING  
> OH! GRAVE, THY VICTORY?


End file.
